Developer Hiring Blog

On the surface, the concept of managing employees seems simple. You set their goals, help them work towards hitting them, and make adjustments whenever necessary. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that. Jeff Haden of CBS MoneyWatch once wrote, “Managing is straightforward; leadership is not. You really earn your management stripes when the right answer is, at times, also the hardest answer.”

Earning those management stripes often means making mistakes along the way. But even with the pressure to hire developers increasing, here are a few pitfalls that all talent acquisition leaders should avoid.

You’ve made the case to hire a new tech recruiter, and you’ve found some great people to do the job. They’re probably ready to dive right in, and you know they’ll help you hit your hiring goals. But no matter how confident you are in their abilities, they still need some time to settle into their new jobs.

That’s not to say that a new tech recruiter can’t have an immediate impact. But as their manager, there are ways that you can jumpstart their tenure at your company. Here are a few tips to help you get your new tech recruiters up to speed quickly.

When you’re overwhelmed at work, it’s easy to focus only on what could be better about your team’s circumstances. After all, there will always be difficult developer job openings on your plate and you could always use an additional recruiter or two. Plus, you could probably use a little extra budget, right?

But what about the people that you do have on staff? How can you get the maximum amount of output from each person to hit your hiring goals, without overworking them? Here are a few team building strategies that all HR leaders can rely on to manage their understaffed tech recruitment teams.

Congratulations! Your company has evolved into a more mature business, and it needs even more developers. Plus, you’re leading the team that will be responsible for finding and hiring the tech talent to take the organization even further.

Does that sound like an exciting challenge? Well, that probably depends. If you can’t add more tech recruiters, you might be more nervous than enthusiastic. While finding and hiring developers isn’t impossible when you’re understaffed at work, you will need to be more strategic about hitting your hiring goals.

Still, where do you even begin? We sat down with two HR leaders here at Stack Overflow and asked them how they’ve tackled this challenge in the past, especially as developer hiring has evolved. Here’s what they had to say.

If you were to ask someone who has never recruited developers to describe your job, you’d probably get a few interesting answers. But you’d likely find few, if any, who’d say that a tech recruiter should ever push back on a final hiring decision. After all, your engineering managers know their teams better than you do, right? Why would you ever question their feedback on developers?

Of course, you know that’s not an accurate overview of your job. You’re responsible for building relationships with developers, providing a top-notch candidate experience, and partnering with hiring managers to select the right people to join the team.

That’s a tall order—and as challenging as your job already is, there’s one tough question you need to ask your technical managers during the interview process.

Tech recruiting is a unique challenge. It’s a fast-paced role in a world where the talent pool is mostly passive. It requires a laser-sharp focus to keep your hiring process on track. And it requires you to find creative ways to hit your hiring goals without treating people like commodities.

Does this sound tough? That’s because it is! Thankfully, there are some powerful, yet straightforward steps you can take to become a technical recruiter. After you read this article, you’ll have an easy-to-follow action plan to help you get started.

On the surface, technical recruiting might seem like a straightforward activity. Your job is to find talented developers, get them excited about your engineering culture, and then make it as easy as possible for them to join your company. However, most technical recruiters would probably agree that so much more goes into hiring programmers—and that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the day-to-day tasks required to execute an effective developer hiring process. Even if you feel confident in your team’s ability to handle the workload, here are a few signs that it’s time to grow your tech recruiting team.

Establishing partnerships with your engineering managers can give you an edge when you’re recruiting developers. They can draw on their past experiences to identify what the passive tech candidates you’re trying to attract are looking for in new jobs. But without setting clear expectations around communication throughout the developer hiring process, you run the risk of losing their trust. To help you establish a stronger line of communication with them and stay on track to hit your hiring goals, here are a few strategies to help you get started.

As many new tech recruiters get up to speed on the challenges of developer hiring, building relationships with those candidates might sound like an impossible task. While it takes a good amount of effort to understand what they want and how they want to be recruited, programmers won’t put you through a quiz-style interview to prove that you know what you’re doing. Still, there are ways that you can be proactive about building credibility with developer candidates. Here are a few tips to make your transition into technical recruiting a little easier.

If you were to ask the people around your office to describe what sourcers are responsible for, you’d probably find that many people view them as junior-level employees who handle administrative tasks and hope to become full-time recruiters someday. But they play a crucial role in finding and engaging with the developers your company wants to hire. Even though tech sourcers and recruiters do have different responsibilities, let’s take a closer look at how they can (and should) work together to hire developers.